This book is an important contribution to the current lively debate about the relationship between law and society in the Roman world. This debate, which was initiated by the work of John Crook in the 1960's, has had a profound impact upon the study of law and history and has created sharply divided opinions on the extent to which law may be said to be a product of the society that created it. This work is a modest attempt to provide a balanced assessment of the various points of view. The chapters within this book have been specifically arranged to represent the debate. It contains an...

While much fundamental research in the recent past has been devoted to the criminal jury in England to 1800, there has been little work on the nineteenth century, and on the civil jury . This important study fills these obvious gaps in the literature. It also provides a re-assessment of standard issues such as jury lenity or equity, while raising questions about orthodoxies concerning the relationship of the jury to the development of laws of evidence. Moreover, re-assessment of the jury in nineteenth-century England rejects the thesis that juries were squeezed out by judges in favour of...

This book discusses in detail how medieval scholars reacted to the casuistic discussions in the inherited Roman texts, particularly the Digest of Justinian. It shows how they developed medieval Roman law into a system of rules that formed a universal common law for Western Europe. Because there has been little research published in English beyond grand narratives on the history of law in Europe, this book fills an important gap in the literature.With a focus on how the medieval Roman lawyers systematised the Roman sources through detailed discussions of specific areas of law.

xlv, 559 pp. When Louisiana enacted its Digest of the Civil Laws in 1808 and Quebec its Civil Code of Lower Canada in 1866, both jurisdictions were in a period of transition-economic, social and political. In both, the laws had originally been transplanted from European nations whose societies were in many ways different from theirs. This book offers the first systematic and detailed exploration of the two new codes in light of social and legal change. Cairns examines the rich, complex, and varying legal cultures-French, Spanish, Civilian and Anglo-American-on which the two sets of redactors...